Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Fabric is our friend

I know nothing about French linens really, but it became clear after a brief period of eBaying that 'metis' means 'linen and cotton blend' and 'Fleur Bleue' is the one you want if you are buying metis. Apparently the blue print along the side of the tea towel wears off as you wash it, so if it's bright you know it's probably never been used.

Of course, having the sticker still attached is another clue:

Also, this particular pair of towels are still crisp and sleek, suggesting they have rarely even been unfolded.

There's no blue in the stripe, but otherwise: perfect for my Pyrex. And actually, I have a set of red and yellow square bowls that I use a lot for serving condiments and other small portions, so these tea towels will be perfect to set under them. Plus, they don't smell!!! And neither does the large linen sheet any more, after ten days on the cottage deck. It does have a pine sap stain I haven't been able to remove yet, but it's near the bottom hem so I decided not to fuss about it.

I didn't post Friday as you know, because I was expecting furniture. It was supposed to come at 9am and didn't, so around 11:30 I called the store to ask whether they were on their way yet, whereupon I found out that they thought they were coming in three weeks. Pete and I had already removed our original dining table and loaded it up to drive to the cottage, so I was very grateful when they arranged to race over that afternoon instead. Even though it mean there was no time post-delivery to put our living room back into any semblance of 'liveable' before we left again for the cottage.

That was about the peak level of the last few days, on the house front. (On the cottage front, we had perfect weather and all our neighbours who weren't away were super happy, so good times were had by all.)

Sadly at home, after the delivery started, everything started to go very wrong.

First off, I realized that our dining table's pedestal base was a huge mistake.

We should have ordered legs, because the top is only 36" wide and the feet of the pedestal fill that space so completely, it's not possible to get the chairs under at all without lifting them in, and the don't line up neatly along the side because the middle one wants to sit in farther than the side ones are able. I realize this is a character flaw on my part but that is WAY too messy looking for me.

Then the sofa came in and I thought Wow! Leo told us we wouldn't be able to seat three people on this thing but we totally can! and also, Wow! I must have mismeasured the wall I cleared for this thing because it is jutting out about 14"!

Sigh.

No, and no. It turns out that in all the mayhem of ordering all that stuff in one afternoon, Leo accidentally left off the critical word 'condo' from the 'sofa' on the order slip. Consequently the workshop built us a full sized sofa that won't fit in our future living room, and which is now sitting at the side of the current living/storage room with a cover over it until the store can send somebody to pick it up again. In, I don't know, three weeks?

Right now I am casting my eye over the rest of our main living space, which resembles a crowded warehouse, and feeling grateful we will be leaving regularly for the cottage, and hoping the store will actually call me back with a solution to all this.

While I was waiting for the delivery though, Ray broke his foot, which is incredibly painful and will take 6-8 weeks to heal. Even as we all wince and think Whoa, that is so awful for him, I know you are also realizing the same thing I am and that Ray, to his credit, is too. If he's not back to work until the end of September and the house looks like this right now...

We have some serious logistical pretzel time ahead of us.

So let's take a moment to say how great a good fabric is, and how wonderful it is for the way it can be hung up and drawn over large areas of clutter almost as though it's not there.

Okay, maybe not these particular towels.

But they are still a powerful reminder of the power of textiles, right?